Radio show archives are hard to find. When they’re available at all, it’s often in awkward formats. (To get my hands on the radio sitcom Cabin Pressure, I had to buy one season as a music album and another as an audiobook.) You can find some shows on the Internet Archive, but listening to them is awkward. The website Fourble solves that problem.
Fourble is two things: First, it’s a tool for taking a list of mp3s from the web and turning them into a podcast feed, which you can load into any podcast player. Second, it’s a directory of shows that have been turned into podcasts using this tool.
On Fourble you can find over 750 shows, a wide range of radio broadcasts, contemporary and historical, mostly from the UK and U.S. Here are some of the best:
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Star Wars: The Original Radio Dramas: NPR’s audio adaptation of the original Star Wars trilogy
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The Wheel of Time: Audiobook of the Robert Jordan fantasy series, split into over 700 chapters
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Tumanbay: Epic radio drama inspired by the Egyptian Mamluk slave dynasty
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Dragnet: 344 episodes of the 1950s ripped-from-the-headlines detective show
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Abbott & Costello: Over 170 sketches, full episodes, and assorted bits from the “Who’s on First” comedy duo
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Gunsmoke: 50s radio Western
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Yes Minister: Radio adaptation of the British political sitcom
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The Flight of the Conchords: Precursor to the band’s TV show
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The Complete Mr Ripley: Adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel series
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Earthsearch: James Follett’s 80s sci-fi drama about a generation ship finding its way home to Earth
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Lights Out: 30s/40s American horror show
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John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme: Contemporary British sketch show
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A Canticle for Liebowitz: Audio recording of Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s novel
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I Robot: Radio adaptation of Asimov’s short stories
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Bleak Expectations: Goofy Charles Dickens parody with episode titles like “A Life Sadly Smashed Then Happily Restored A Bit,” “A Now Grim Life Yet More Grimified,” and “A Horrible Life Un-ruined And Then Re-ruinated A Lot”
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That Mitchell & Webb Sound: The radio precursor to the TV sketch show That Mitchell & Webb Look
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Angstrom: Spoof about a Scandanavian detective, from two writers for That Mitchell & Webb Look
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I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue: Over 500 episodes of the British comedy panel show from the 70s to 2018
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Howard Stern 1990s: A compilation of old Stern episodes
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The Ricky Gervais Show: The first 12 episodes of the show that made Karl Pilkington famous
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Agatha Christie: 49 BBC adaptations of the mystery writer’s work
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The Adventures of Horatio Hornblower: 1950s radio adaptation of the C. S. Forester novels
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Blue Jam: 90s late-night show from Brass Eye creator Chris Morris, featuring music interspersed with sometimes disturbing comedy sketches
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On the Hour: News parody show from Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci, and the first appearance of Steve Coogan’s character Alan Partridge
For each show, you can adjust how quickly the episodes show up in your podcast feed. If you find a set of mp3 files somewhere on the web, you can create a new podcast feed for them, no matter what their content is. You could, for example, turn a publicly available music album into a podcast.
Fourble doesn’t host these shows, it just makes an RSS feed for them. And a lot of these mp3 lists exist in a legal grey area, so they’re subject to takedowns. If the files are deleted from the original source before they show up in your player, you can’t get them back. So if you think a show is in danger of getting taken offline (but you feel like the currently available files don’t count as theft), download it immediately.
Fourble is named after “The Thing on the Fourble Board,” a popular episode of the 1940s radio horror show Quiet, Please!
It’s a creepy story about a creature living in the bowels of the earth, dug up and brought into the light — like an old radio show buried in the Internet Archive. You can hear 86 episodes of Quiet, Please! on Fourble.
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